Amassing terrabytes of data and analyzing the hell out of it — that’s the key to wildly successful predictive analytics, right? This Citi North America marketing maven tells you why you’re so wrong — and how to do it right.

You’re wasting thousands of hours and millions of dollars, says Citi North America’s David Landau, head of the company’s onsite and email acquisition, if you think that predictive analytics all comes down to the data — how much you have, how much more you can get, and how to crunch it.

“At the end of the day, it’s about what do I know about the customer, and what does the customer expect from me?” Landau explains. “I think companies need to realize that dumping more data in doesn’t refine those basics — and they really are basics.”

Too many companies focus on the numbers and forget the art, he explains, They’re refining models, testing models, bringing in yet more data, and wondering why they’re still failing to reach their target, again and again — because marketers are relinquishing the reins to the data scientists and the technologists. They’re forgetting the heart of what drives their real success in making solid, lasting connections with customers. Hint: it’s not data.

“If you don’t put enough time and care on the messaging and the offer that you’re putting out there,” Landau says, “all of the work that you invested in the data is a mistake.”

Of course the data’s essential — when you take a step back to figure out what’s important to your customer, then you need to establish whether you have the precise data and the right modeling to meet that customer challenge.

But then, Landau says, the real challenge is how to overlay the art on top of the analytics to bring those data elements to life for the customer.

“That’s what they experience,” he says. “They experience the art. They don’t care about the science. They’re not going to be impressed that you gave me a really crappy ad, but man that was great targeting behind it.”

Conversations about marketing strategy are getting cluttered by and overwhelmed with the technological nitty-gritty, and marketers are losing their focus — the customer experience.

“Marketing needs to put themselves back in the driver’s seat of those conversations,” Landau says. “Because that’s the piece that some technologists and some data scientists, they’re not close enough to in order to appreciate. And marketing needs to drive that part of the strategic conversation rather than becoming an afterthought.”

“Marketing must speak up and says, ‘This is who I’m trying to reach. Help me reach them better, and I can put the tools in your hand that makes your data look smart,’” he continues. That, he says, is when the real power of predictive analytics is unlocked. And it all comes back to the marriage of art and science driving real results.

Join Landau and fellow data pros from Lavastorm Analytics and Yeoman Technologies to find out how to apply each, in what measure.

In this webinar you’ll learn to:

Determine which data points are most effectively aligned with your business purposes

Speakers:

David Landau, Head of Onsite and Email Acquisition Citi North America

Deep Varma, VP of Engineering, Trulia

Michael Healey, CEO, Yeoman Technologies

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/27/how-citi-north-america-nails-predictive-analytics-for-marketers-art-versus-science-vb-live/feed/01990300How Citi North America nails predictive analytics for marketers: Art versus Science (VB Live)Secrets of predictive analytics — in plain English (VB Live)http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/04/secrets-of-predictive-analytics-in-plain-english-vb-live/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/04/secrets-of-predictive-analytics-in-plain-english-vb-live/#respondSat, 04 Jun 2016 21:10:49 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1968511VB LIVE: The data is readily available. So why are only a minority of marketers and entrepreneurs using predictive analytics to anticipate customers’ needs — and increase conversions? Learn how to become one of them in this VB Live webinar where key concepts and best practices are plainly spelled out so you can start putting them into practice. Register here for free. Anticipating consumer […]
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VB LIVE:

The data is readily available. So why are only a minority of marketers and entrepreneurs using predictive analytics to anticipate customers’ needs — and increase conversions? Learn how to become one of them in this VB Live webinar where key concepts and best practices are plainly spelled out so you can start putting them into practice.

Anticipating consumer interest for the future may seem as magical as pulling a rabbit out of your hat, but thanks to predictive analytics, marketers can turn big data into a crystal ball to see where the market — and their customers — are heading.

By analyzing the vast amount of real-time customer data alongside historical data and customer insight, predictive analytics allows you to anticipate needs, not just respond to them. It allows you to surprise your audience by using their buying history to transform their shopping experience into something far more personalized. Needless to say, when consumers are presented with products or experiences they love, you’re gonna see sales rise as a result.

The annual Duke CMO Survey stated 65 percent of marketers lack the ability to really measure marketing impact accurately. Going hand-in-hand with that lack of confidence is stress, as 65 percent of marketers said pressure from their board or CEO is increasing. For the metrics demonstrating impact of marketing spending on business, 19 percent have yet to show short-term impact, while 23 percent were unable to show it long term. The takeaway from all this is that marketers’ lack of confidence in their own analytic abilities is leading to serious lost opportunities.

Lack of confidence may also explain why we’re seeing low participation in predictive analytics. We surveyed 1,000 marketers regarding marketing data and analytics reports, and found that while a majority were comfortable with reporting on what’s happened in the past, barely a third of their time (37 percent) was spent on predicting and influencing the future.

Ok, that’s a bit of what’s going on right now. But how do you fix this?

In this upcoming VB Live event, VB analyst Jon Cifuentes, together with Citi’s David Landau, will pull back the curtain to talk about how to begin applying predictive analytics in ways that will have meaningful outcomes — including on your bottom line.

In this webinar you’ll learn to:

Determine which data points are most effectively aligned with your business purposes.

Speakers include:

David Landau, Head of Onsite and Email Acquisition Citi North America

Deep Varma, VP of Engineering, Trulia

Michael Healey, CEO, Yeoman Technologies

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/04/secrets-of-predictive-analytics-in-plain-english-vb-live/feed/01968511Secrets of predictive analytics — in plain English (VB Live)Predictive analytics for non-geeks: How to get what you need out of big data (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/24/predictive-analytics-for-non-geeks-how-to-get-what-you-need-out-of-big-data-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/24/predictive-analytics-for-non-geeks-how-to-get-what-you-need-out-of-big-data-webinar/#respondWed, 24 Feb 2016 12:35:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1882104VB WEBINAR: Anticipating your customers’ needs depends on essential data you can interpret without a graduate degree in data science. Join VB analyst Jon Cifuentes and Bertram Capital’s Tom Long as they discuss the best data tools and platforms for marketers — and essential strategies to meet customers’ needs before even they know they have them. Register […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Anticipating your customers’ needs depends on essential data you can interpret without a graduate degree in data science. Join VB analyst Jon Cifuentes and Bertram Capital’s Tom Long as they discuss the best data tools and platforms for marketers — and essential strategies to meet customers’ needs before even they know they have them.

Everyone wants to anticipate the next big consumer trend — or at least where your own customers are headed — but unless you were a data scientist or analyst, you wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails out of the big data. At least, that was the mentality a few years ago.

Now, thanks to advancements in software, you no longer have to be data science grad to make sense out of predictive analytics. Given the anticipated 2018 shortage gap of data scientists — between 50 percent and 60 percent in the United States alone according to McKinsey — it’s a good thing the restrictions on big data have decreased.

More approachable big data, however, does not mean a free ride in interpreting those numbers. There’s still an overwhelming amount of analytic data to sort through, such as customer data, log data, inventory data, search data, and more. As the annual Duke CMO Survey showed, 65 percent of marketers feel pressured to prove their worth by their board or CEO, and yet 65 percent said they lack the ability to really measure marketing impact accurately.

When we questioned marketers on the types of analytic roles they are responsible for at their company, nearly 40 percent sided with audience insights, while growth and conversion tracking lagged behind. When the question was narrowed down to roles they were primarily responsible for, most marketers utilizing analytics aligned with growth and conversion tracking. Cross platform marketing (attribution), customer experience, and big data were under-represented in the user interviews; demonstrating how marketers are only focusing on what they can clearly see and count and the huge opportunities they were missing because of it.

As to predictive analytics, marketers are overall comfortable on reporting on the past, without realizing the serious money they’re leaving behind in the process. 73 percent of marketing analytics reporting time is spent on evaluating the past and the present, while only 27 percent is spent on predicting and influencing the future. Meanwhile, future “industry leading marketing teams” are too busy focusing on tomorrow than contemplating yesterday.

Of course, to really get on top of all this, you need the right platforms to support you. Our report also dove into which vendors are leading the pack, and analyst Jon Cifuentes along Bertram Capital Head of growth and marketing Tom Long, will take you through the winners along with everything you need to know about analytic data to improve your marketing strategy.

What do personalized recommendations for shopping (Amazon, eBay), entertainment (Netflix, Spotify), and social media (Facebook, Twitter) have in common? It’s not clairvoyance; it’s data science, and it provides curated — and therefore, better — product experiences for consumers.

Since entering the tech world before the original dot-com bubble, I have been fascinated by data and the insights it reveals for driving decisions. When I began in digital media, we could provide our customers with a level of attribution and ROI for their advertising dollars that could not be found with traditional means. For example, if a consumer clicked on an ad, we could determine where bookings were being driven from for our airline partners.

Over the last 15 years, data science has come a long way, and the opportunities now enable startups like ours to move faster than traditional and legacy businesses. Whether helping consumers find better jobs or the best places to eat — and save them time doing so — data has offered critical access to the businesses I have had the pleasure to work with.

At Nowait, we are heavily focused on data to help alleviate a universal pain point — waiting. Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line, which equates to you waiting in line for six straight months over your lifetime.

Everyone has to wait, everywhere. And everyone hates it, everywhere. It’s become a necessary evil that people have become accustomed to tolerating. However, with data science, we have been able to give people back the most important thing in life – their time.

But what does being a data-driven company mean?

1. Your technology makes you smarter

Technology must be your company’s core driver, but with so many platforms available, which ones are best? There are countless tools available for capturing, analyzing, and displaying data — and everything in between.

We use lots of tools to help us with our business. Periscope Data is a data-analysis tool that uses caching and statistical sampling to run fast data analyses. Based on user experience, we share key learnings company-wide on dashboards. Seeing is believing, and walking through the office amid a sea of highly visual charts on everyone’s laptops fosters a culture of transparency and collaboration.

Flurry and Mixpanel are mobile- and web-analytics platforms to help us examine our customers’ behavior while they use our app, enabling us to build better products.

Appsee is an in-app analytics platform that allows developers to see user behavior in real time, yet is transparent to the user, and assists developers in improving the user experience. By deep-diving into data, we can uncover meaningful insights into product usage, conversion rates, and user retention.

In addition to the platforms we use, we have a data science team to interpret rich data sources, often working by exploratory analysis and rapid iteration. These are the folks who are paid to understand data and know how to pivot quickly, based on the impact it can have on a business. In fact, data scientists have been hailed by the Harvard Business Review as “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.”

2. You can identify “magical moments”

Data helps you make more informed decisions about what products to build, how to optimize them, and, in turn, dazzle your customers. By anticipating their needs and behaviors, you can identify “magical moments” that lead to lasting user engagement. It makes decision-making faster, as well as more objective — let the data decide how you can best serve your users.

When individuals understand the core drivers of their business, they can be more innovative in finding ways to enhance the metrics and deepen customer understanding. We use data to learn from these “magical moments” in our product and bring those into the spotlight.

3. Your customer service sets you apart

Since launching our consumer app in early 2014, Nowait has used data to make restaurants and their guests more successful. We’re a tech startup in the hospitality industry, but at our core, we’re a hospitality-first company. We were founded on data, which gives us the benefit of building our business around it — without having to back into it.

In order to stay abreast of the competition — but more importantly, to innovate — companies must learn and understand where the growth is happening in their market and be there first. Buried within this bottomless data lies insights and intelligence that could enable companies to gain a competitive edge and provide an overall better consumer experience, which is why data science is a necessity, not a luxury.

Whether you are a data-oriented startup or a legacy business now bringing in analytics capabilities, data has to be your driver. It’s always best to start from a data orientation — from your hiring, to the products you build, to the culture you create. Starting from this perspective is much easier than evolving to it, so pull up a chair and start devouring that data. You’ll discover delicious insights that you didn’t even know existed.

Ware Sykes is the CEO of Nowait, the first mobile network for casual-dining restaurants.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/09/becoming-a-better-brand-through-data-driven-discoveries-webinar/feed/01873086Becoming a better brand through data-driven discoveries (webinar)Data deluge: Indentifying the most important data for customer results (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/04/data-deluge-indentifying-the-most-important-data-for-customer-results-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/04/data-deluge-indentifying-the-most-important-data-for-customer-results-webinar/#respondThu, 04 Feb 2016 15:55:58 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1869864VB WEBINAR: It’s not the size of your data stockpile, it’s how you use it. Join the digital marketing gurus who can make data do headstands, as they break down the latest VB Insight Marketing Analytics Report and share insights from the front line. Register here for free. Many college graduates face a Catch-22: They can’t get […]
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VB WEBINAR:

It’s not the size of your data stockpile, it’s how you use it. Join the digital marketing gurus who can make data do headstands, as they break down the latest VB Insight Marketing Analytics Report and share insights from the front line.

Many college graduates face a Catch-22: They can’t get credit because they don’t have credit histories and they don’t have credit histories because they can’t get credit. Without a FICO score, getting a loan seems elusive.

Startup lender Upstart, however, is more interested in GPAs than FICO scores. The company focuses on consumers’ education, area of study, college or university, employee, and job more than old-fashioned FICO figures, says Mike Osborn, CMO. Data shows there’s a strong correlation between educational performances and, ultimately, job performance, he says, and that is a strong predictor of an individual’s likelihood of repaying a loan.

Upstart, which was founded by ex-Googlers, also relies on analytics to market its services to its primary customer base: Millennials. The firm’s team of data scientists uses machine learning, econometrics, and computer science and diverse data sources including social media activity and how individuals actually apply for credit to target groups within its market, he says.

This granular approach allows Upstart to market to precise segments, not all 50 million Americans who have short or zero credit histories, says Osborn. For example, it reaches out to recent software engineering graduates and immigrants with technology jobs through its campaigns, he says.

As Upstart’s underwriting model gets smarter and uncovers more data sources, it will uncover more targets and more marketing approaches, says Osborn. In fact, the company’s approach calls for frequently reinventing its model through its discovery and use of data sources as well as past results, he says.

Although analytics are a critical component of Upstart’s marketing, many CMOs lack expertise in this area, says Osborn.

“Building world-class analytics is absolutely a core component of building out marketing for the future. From my experience, the vast majority of CMOs or marketing executives are ill-suited to drive that transformation,” he says. “When you look at the household names on the consumer side … the marketing career paths in those companies almost always came up through the creative side. They didn’t have accountability for the day-to-day results they could or should have.”

Know you need analytics but don’t know where to start? Begin by joining VB analyst Jon Cifuentes at this not-to-be-missed webinar. Cifuentes will take attendees through the most important takeaways from VB’s report, including the range of tools and platforms that are relied on for data — from audience insights and ad effectiveness to mobile analytics and cross-platform management.

He’ll be joined by experts in the field including Ken Davis, EasyTask CEO, Mike Osborn, CMO of Upstart, and Ware Sykes, CEO of Nowait who will share inside strategies and tips.

What you’ll learn:

Ways to get c-level and board buy-in for your analytics infrastructure

Hurdles to avoid

Must-have software features

Speakers:

Ken Davis, CEO, EasyTask

Mike Osborn, CMO, Upstart

Ware Sykes, CEO, Nowait

Jon Cifuentes, Research Analyst, VentureBeat

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/04/data-deluge-indentifying-the-most-important-data-for-customer-results-webinar/feed/01869864Data deluge: Indentifying the most important data for customer results (webinar)Thriving on data: Generating meaningful insights for extraordinary results (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/01/thriving-on-data-generating-meaningful-insights-for-extraordinary-results-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/01/thriving-on-data-generating-meaningful-insights-for-extraordinary-results-webinar/#respondMon, 01 Feb 2016 23:21:20 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1869703VB WEBINAR: It’s not the size of your data stockpile, it’s how you use it. Join the digital marketing gurus who can make data do headstands, as they break down the latest VB Insight Marketing Analytics Report and share insights from the front line. Register here for free! Nowait knows how to leverage data. The company has […]
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VB WEBINAR:

It’s not the size of your data stockpile, it’s how you use it. Join the digital marketing gurus who can make data do headstands, as they break down the latest VB Insight Marketing Analytics Report and share insights from the front line.

Nowait knows how to leverage data. The company has evolved from a text message waitlist system to a restaurant management solution in part because Nowait CEO Ware Sykes, as he puts it, is unapologetically obsessed with data.

And while the ability to track and engineer data is at a much higher level than it was five years ago, the latest VB Insight Marketing Analytics report has found that the ability to turn that data into insight has not grown anywhere near as quickly.

But companies like Nowait are breaking the mold. Nowait is dedicated to using the metrics they capture at every touchpoint on both sides of their app — restaurant-goer and restaurant — to improve the way businesses run and the way people live their lives.

Over 25 million people use Nowait to gain control over how and where they wait for tables at over 4,000 restaurants. With a variety of sophisticated tools, including a new confidential self-reporting tool for diners, Nowait gathers customer data that they’ve turned into a way to not only help restaurants run more efficiently but also deliver extraordinary customer service.

“We can actually tell restaurants how well and efficiently they’re seating their customers,” Sykes says. Using Nowait app feedback, one of their clients discovered that during their very busy peak hours, they weren’t seating their restaurants at full capacity.

“They redesigned their restaurants using our data and got a substantial lift in sales,” Sykes says, “simply by making their table layouts more efficient.”

Another restaurant was able to track back a customer experience to a specific table, at a specific time, being served by a specific staff member. When a waiter ignored a consumer’s gluten-free request and got sick, the restaurant was able to make reparations and ensure the situation never occurred again.

None of this information would mean much to clients, Sykes cautions, if you overwhelm them with the data they need. “You have to make the data as delicious as possible,” he says. “It’s important that tools you use can be used by people outside the company.”

Beyond the software and tools, Sykes says, Nowait is simply a fundamentally data-driven company, with a culture where data is celebrated and every decision is shaped by data.

For Sykes, achieving this is based on hiring data-driven professionals in every role. A data-oriented organization eliminates the HIPPO (highest individually paid person’s opinion) problem.

“It comes back to who has the best data,” he explains.

Any employee at any level of the organization — if they have a substantive, data-driven case—can offer solutions. The playing field is leveled so the best ideas always come forward.

Start-ups have the opportunity to build data into everything they do from the ground up. And while that’s a challenge for big companies, with a workforce that might not have the knowledge and tools they need, nowadays it’s the only way to win.

For more about the technology, tools, and infrastructure you need to conquer in a data-saturated market, join our free VentureBeat webinar. VB’s analyst Jon Cifuentes will take attendees through the most important take-aways of our latest report. He’ll be joined by Sykes and others who will share critical insights from the front-lines.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Determine your organization’s primary objectives for analytics

Winnow down your options to a handful of appropriate platforms

Come up with ways to measure success

Generate meaningful business insight from data

Plan for the future by the ability to add new data sources and tools

Speakers:

Jon Cifuentes, Analyst, VB Insight

Ken Davis, CEO, TaskEasy

Ware Sykes, CEO, Nowait

Mike Osborn, CMO, Upstart

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/01/thriving-on-data-generating-meaningful-insights-for-extraordinary-results-webinar/feed/01869703Thriving on data: Generating meaningful insights for extraordinary results (webinar)Data-mining challenges: Finding the gems that will reap the most rewards (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/27/data-mining-challenges-finding-the-gems-that-will-reap-the-most-rewards-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/27/data-mining-challenges-finding-the-gems-that-will-reap-the-most-rewards-webinar/#respondWed, 27 Jan 2016 23:50:55 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1866883VB WEBINAR: Make the most of your data. VB Insight’s Jon Cifuentes chats with TaskEasy’s CEO and Upstart’s CMO about how to build a solid analytics powerhouse that drives killer results. Register here for free. Ore mining involves digging through the earth to discover generous veins of material that can be turned into prospective riches. Similarly, data mining […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Make the most of your data. VB Insight’s Jon Cifuentes chats with TaskEasy’s CEO and Upstart’s CMO about how to build a solid analytics powerhouse that drives killer results.

Ore mining involves digging through the earth to discover generous veins of material that can be turned into prospective riches. Similarly, data mining involves digging through a database to discover generous veins of sales that can be turned into prospective riches.

And running a lucrative digital-marketing program in 2016 is more than just filling servers with scads of data pulled from existing consumers and prospective customers hitting your website. It’s how you subsequently mine that data to discover the treasure that’s buried within that sets the profitable companies apart from those who are blowing their budgets on data collection because they don’t know how to translate the data into useful information.

VentureBeat’s upcoming webinar, “Data-driven: Customer-obsessed results through analytics,” will delve into Jon Cifuentes’ recent “The State of Marketing Analytics” report, which is derived from a survey of over 1,000 marketing-analytics professionals, a review of hundreds of vendor-driven, best-practices documents, and more. Among its points, the report references the annual Duke CMO Survey, which claims that 65 percent of the respondents lack the ability to accurately measure their marketing impact. While those figures seem disturbing and dire, Cifuentes’ cup-half-full vision concludes that it signals that “a huge opportunity is buried in the data, waiting to be uncovered.”

To that point, the webinar will also look at the state of data analytics through the real-world experience of some top companies’ executives who have been in the data trenches and emerged alive and well. They’ll recount how they structured their data-collection process, but more importantly how they then put that data to use to drive their businesses in the right direction.

One such exec is Ken Davis, CEO of Salt Lake City-based TaskEasy. His firm connects home owners and property managers with contractors who can handle such critical tasks as lawn maintenance and clearing snow.

“We facilitate services disposition in a way that provides the consumer with the same experience that they would have if they were shipping a package via FedEx or ordering a taxi from Uber,” said Ken Davis, TaskEasy’s CEO.

TaskEasy vets and ranks contractors, and ensures good quality service through a money-back guarantee; offers accountability for owners/managers who may not be local to their property, through geofencing and photographic proof to confirm the contractor went to the site and completed the work; and offers discounts to multiple property owners, such as homeowners’ associations and real-estate investors.

A large number of TaskEasy’s engineering team, Davis included, previously worked for Oakley Networks — a cybersecurity company that analyzed data to seek out threats and was later sold to Raytheon. While Davis said their previous experience “probably overqualifies us to analyze data related to lawn mowing,” their background gives them a unique perspective on how they can put data to good use for the benefit of TaskEasy’s customers and contractor network (the latter which is comprised of over 14,000 registered contractors, with 5,000 of them who “scored high enough that we continue to use them,” Davis said)

For instance, Davis explained that his team’s deep analytics background also enables them to better cope with and even predict what he calls a “wave problem,” where the number of lawns TaskEasy facilitates in a week may fluctuate from a “normal” count, such as those due to weather problems or because a customer’s kid mowed the lawn without knowing a contractor had been scheduled to do the work.

“There’s just a hundred reasons why that happens, but we now manage them aggressively and analytically,” Davis said, “so that, from a predictability standpoint and from a performance standpoint, we can still achieve near-perfect execution for our customers, because we understand that analytic wave in this case.”

If you’re looking for ways you can put your company’s data gathering to best use, you’d be smart to check out this webinar to get answers to your questions, and to hear more from Davis and other data wizards about their real-world strategies, tactics, and results.

Speakers:

Jon Cifuentes, Analyst, VB Insight

Ken Davis, CEO, TaskEasy

Ware Sykes, CEO, Nowait

Mike Osborn, CMO, Upstart

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/27/data-mining-challenges-finding-the-gems-that-will-reap-the-most-rewards-webinar/feed/01866883Data-mining challenges: Finding the gems that will reap the most rewards (webinar)Future Marketing: 4 steps to achieve data-driven marketing (webinar recap)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/30/future-marketing-4-steps-to-achieve-data-driven-marketing-webinar-recap/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/30/future-marketing-4-steps-to-achieve-data-driven-marketing-webinar-recap/#respondWed, 30 Dec 2015 15:35:42 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1856293GUEST: Missed it? You can still access our webinar and see this powerhouse panel unravel the the most important aspects of marketing analytics. Access the webinar right here for free. If you attended the recent VB Marketing Analytics roundtable with Foursquare CRO Steven Rosenblatt, VentureBeat Analyst Jon Cifuentes, and myself, chances are you’re feeling a bit intimidated by the data-driven future […]
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GUEST:

Missed it? You can still access our webinar and see this powerhouse panel unravel the the most important aspects of marketing analytics.

If you attended the recent VB Marketing Analytics roundtable with Foursquare CRO Steven Rosenblatt, VentureBeat Analyst Jon Cifuentes, and myself, chances are you’re feeling a bit intimidated by the data-driven future of marketing we presented. You aren’t alone.

It isn’t that journey mapping, situational-segmentation, or micro-marketing are techniques you can’t wrap your head around; it’s that they seem impossible to actually implement within your own company.

Have faith. Here are the four steps we discussed at the end of the roundtable in greater detail. Follow them to implement future marketing within your company:

1. Segment your digital relationships

The distinction between friends and followers doesn’t actually mean anything outside of marketing. Break your digital relationships into five more meaningful groups: prospects, customers, influencers, partners, and competitors. Doing this isn’t as complicated as it seems. Customers, for example, leave a digital record in your company’s ERP system; prospects do not. Phone numbers or email addresses (what I call bridging data) connect them to your online followers and help you define these two groups. This segmentation is an often-overlooked step and defines how you will interact with each consumer going forward—this segmentation is combined with other data (for more information on the 5 types of marketing information see here).

2. Define how you interact with each segment

Converting digital relationships into revenue isn’t an action you can directly take; it is the result of a well-orchestrated series of events. And it starts by understanding each individual interaction your company is having with consumers. This is what big data actually is — but the infatuation with “big data” demographic details force most companies to overlook the more valuable insight. Big data can tell you: when we do this, they do that. It provides the blueprint for what actions you can take to get the results you want, for each segment, and for increasingly smaller segments. However, all results are not equal.

3. Identify ideal behaviors

Marketers care about increasing friends, collecting more data, and inducing more downloads. The business cares about revenue and profit, getting more customers, and increasing CLV. Future Marketing necessitates focusing on these outcomes because it will get business leaders listening. This holds true for both the physical and the digital worlds; social, mobile and big data initiatives must produce tangible results if it is to influence more than just the marketing department.

Defining the outcomes that most benefit your organization — actions that convert consumers to customers and convert them more quickly or at a higher value — allows you to focus in on those actions, understand which interactions you are trying to force consumers to take. Today’s best companies understan that interacting with consumers is still about influencing them to do what you want. This basic rule of sale and marketing has not changed.

4. Uncover profitable patterns and segments

Marketers have grown passive; they’ve become scared of the new power that social consumers wield via social networks. But let’s separate that fear from the task at hand: getting consumer to do what you want — buy more stuff, buy more often, and buy more add-on products and services.

To reveal the patterns that produce these outcomes, don’t start with broad analysis but rather start with one ideal customer — who became a customer quickest, who spent the most money, who generated the most profit? Take that one customer and understand the pattern they followed. That is the pattern you want to mold all consumers to. Measure your ability to get consumers to follow these patterns and you begin to see what needs to change.

It should be fairly obvious that marketing will not be able to do this alone. You — the marketing expert — will need to set the guiding light, explain it in terms each department understands, and coordinate their activity, building what I call an integrated enterprise that can seamlessly leverage all things digital. But here’s the thing to remember about future-marketing: it isn’t so different than traditional marketing. Just remember to explain these techniques in traditional terms — this is what your peers understand and that helps win their support.

These four steps provide the framework. If you need real life examples, or want more detail on each step (including a series of questions that help translate them into your own company) then checkout the new book Big Social Mobile, How Digital Initiatives can Reshape the Enterprise and Create Business Value. It will serve as a playbook to implement these new techniques and technology within your own organization.

David F. Giannetto (@dgiannetto) is a speaker, frequent guest writer and the author of three books including the new release Big Social Mobile (Palgrave Macmillan). He has been named a thought-leader by the AMA, Business Finance Magazine, and Consumer Goods Technology Magazine and is SVP at Astea International. He can be reached via Giannetto.com.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/30/future-marketing-4-steps-to-achieve-data-driven-marketing-webinar-recap/feed/01856293Future Marketing: 4 steps to achieve data-driven marketing (webinar recap)The data maze: Customer-obsessed results through analytics (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/23/the-data-maze-customer-obsessed-results-through-analytics-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/23/the-data-maze-customer-obsessed-results-through-analytics-webinar/#respondWed, 23 Dec 2015 15:35:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1855496VB WEBINAR: Make the most of your data. VB Insight’s Jon Cifuentes chats with TaskEasy’s CEO and Upstart’s CMO about how to build a solid analytics powerhouse that drives killer results. Register here for free. Data mining has become indispensable for organizations — it’s how leaders are making the best business decisions to connect with customers and increase their lifetime […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Make the most of your data. VB Insight’s Jon Cifuentes chats with TaskEasy’s CEO and Upstart’s CMO about how to build a solid analytics powerhouse that drives killer results. Register here for free.

Data mining has become indispensable for organizations — it’s how leaders are making the best business decisions to connect with customers and increase their lifetime value. However, acquiring a large collection of data from a variety of sources has become a double-edged sword. Yes, the tremendous wealth of data provides a great opportunity for marketers to extract meaningful insight, but trying to make sense of it all can be an overwhelming experience and many are simply not up to the task. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

In our VB Insight report, The State of Marketing Analytics: Insights in the age of the customer, 65 percent of marketers said they lack the ability to accurately measure marketing impact. This is significant news, as no matter how much data you’ve sourced, it’s meaningless if you don’t have a team well-prepared to analyze it. It’s not for the lack of trying, though, as 55 percent of the marketers we surveyed said they’ve undergone some kind of formal evaluation for their analytic quality.

However, when we asked how effective their marketing analytics and organization were in generating insight and turning it into action, their responses fell between “somewhat” and “not very” effective. More than 33 percent of growth marketers, mobile/app analytics marketers, ad effectiveness, cross platform, and CX were not at all or not very effective at generating insight. 46 percent of marketers thought their business partners were not at all effective or not very effective at translating their team’s insights into actions or results.

When we asked marketers how they were spending their time generating analytics reports, 38 percent said they were comfortable reporting on the past, 35 percent analyzed the present, while only 27 percent focused on predicting the future. By focusing solely on past reports and allowing it to impact their future decision-making, marketers are leaving serious money on the table.

How are other companies succeeding in vacuuming up data and turning it into meaningful action? Those business aren’t sucking up any and all data they can get their hands on; they’re looking at what will really move the needle for their company.

“Data for data’s sake is really not valuable. It’s all just overhead,” Astea’s VP David Giannetto said in a previous VentureBeat webinar. “You have to have the ability to translate data, or analytics, or data science into something that can impact the business. Find that right moment or that right demographic or that right segment that you can really capitalize on.”

Find the right vendor that matches your brand and will measure data that matters the most to your business. In our insight report, we reviewed hundreds of vendors to outline the best for every use case.

By signing up for this webinar, you’ll discover more successful steps that lead to effective data analysis for your business. With brands planning to increase their budget on marketing analytics by 73 percent in the next three years, it’s more important than ever to ensure all the data you’ve collected doesn’t go to waste.

“If I’m the user, how is this going to make my life better?” This question raised by VentureBeat’s Mark Sullivan is one that must be answered if marketers expect to see any success with today’s consumers.

You can’t just email a generic advertisement to your consumers and expect them to hop aboard. In fact, a majority will hate you for it: According to a Janrain study, nearly three-quarters of consumers become frustrated when they receive content that’s not relevant to their interests, so it’s imperative for you to know what they want and when to give it to them.

Doug Roberge, strategic services consultant at Kahuna, said it best:

“Cohorts and personalization do not mix, because when you’re creating a cohort, you’re creating lookalikes, instead of actually getting what the customer might need.”

However, not every marketer is well-versed in discovering what their audience needs.

According to a VentureBeat Insight report, “The State of Marketing Analytics: Insights in the age of the customer,” about 65 percent of marketers lack the ability to accurately measure marketing impact, meaning lots of useful data is going to waste — data that could have been used to better understand the audience. Meanwhile, those same number of marketers are feeling pressured from their board or CEO to prove their value. The situation becomes more stressful when you consider that, according to the same report, brands plan to increase their spending on marketing analytics by 73 percent over the next three years. To make a long story short, companies need to do some work so they can get their money’s worth.

With so many channels available to use for communication, as well as the ever-evolving social-media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s understandable why marketers are feeling overwhelmed as they try to track all of this data. Perhaps this is why a majority of marketers are only comfortable with reporting on what’s happened in the past, rather than utilizing predictive marketing to increase sales. As overwhelming as all this may seem, it is in fact possible for marketers to stay on top of all of these numbers.

Successful companies have figured out what works for them: Using the right ad platform best suited for their business; effectively engaging with their audiences through their own communication channels; and understanding where the market is heading in the next few years. And they do all this while keeping up on the trends for the growing and constantly-in-motion mobile market.

Mobile is an especially important platform for marketers to utilize, as it bridges a personal connection between you and your consumer at scale. As Michael Becker, managing partner and co-founder at mCordis, said, “The most important real estate in the world is the four-inch screen in the palm of someone’s hands.”

Marketers also don’t have to rely solely on paid channels offering temporary boost. As Sullivan said, “There are plenty of opportunities for marketers to latch themselves to other platforms.”

Facebook’s new notify service may seem like a great way to push your message, but the experience is owned by Facebook and doesn’t provide users with a link to your actual site, meaning you’re not building an audience.

By viewing this on-demand webinar, you’ll learn how the top brands and marketers are able to crunch the numbers to please their audiences; and how they balance paid and owned communications to push their message. With this valuable information, you’ll have an easier time making sure your consumers are satisfied.

Speakers:

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

This webinar is sponsored by Kahuna.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/16/making-must-have-apps-your-customers-cant-live-without-webinar/feed/01843614Making ‘must have’ apps your customers can’t live without (webinar)Marketing analytics: Find out what it takes to play with the big guys (webinar wrap-up)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/11/marketing-analytics-find-out-what-it-takes-to-play-with-the-big-guys-webinar-wrap-up/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/11/marketing-analytics-find-out-what-it-takes-to-play-with-the-big-guys-webinar-wrap-up/#respondFri, 11 Dec 2015 20:44:44 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1850887VB WEBINAR: Predictive analytics? Find out what works — and what doesn’t — in marketing analytics from our expert panel. VB analyst Jon Cifuentes is joined by Foursquare’s CRO Stephen Rosenblatt and Astea’s VP David Giannetto, author of Big Social Mobile. Access the webinar on demand right here. When it comes to marketing analytics, are you a rookie, a tweener, […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Predictive analytics? Find out what works — and what doesn’t — in marketing analytics from our expert panel. VB analyst Jon Cifuentes is joined by Foursquare’s CRO Stephen Rosenblatt and Astea’s VP David Giannetto, author of Big Social Mobile.

When it comes to marketing analytics, are you a rookie, a tweener, or a pro? Our recent webinar, “Marketing Analytics: the secret of segment domination,” asks you to take a good, hard look at your marketing skills — and offers insight on how you can get good enough to hang out with the big guys.

VB Analyst Jon Cifuentes offers an inside look at VB Insight’s deep dive into the marketing analytics landscape and discusses the most critical things marketers need to know, while Steven Rosenblatt, the CRO at Foursquare, and David Giannetto, SVP Services at Astea International, offer key insights from their move to the top of the marketing heap.

Level One: The Rookie

What’s a rookie look like? They’re all about the post-engagement huddle. “Most marketers are most comfortable reporting on what’s happened in the past to impact their future decision making,” Cifuentes says. “And really, with the rise in predictive intelligence and using advanced models to inform future decision making, it’s just leaving money on the table.”

“There is a huge opportunity in buried customer data, waiting to be uncovered,” says Cifuentes.

And it’s coming at a time when the stakes for CMOs have never been higher. Marketers feel more pressured than ever to prove their value — but most lack the ability to measure marketing impact accurately, or even at all.

That’s why spending on marketing analytics will increase by 70 percent in the next three years, with the big guys coming closer to a 100 percent increase.

But most companies are, at best, in the early stages of marketing analytics. True marketing analytics rationalizes users, platforms, and devices. Unfortunately, Cifuentes says, “it’s really challenging data to collect,” and it’s buried deep in hundreds of platforms.

Rookies, Rosenblatt said, go all-or-nothing. “A lot of times we’re so obsessed with acquiring more and more data to try and understand more things,” he says, “versus taking a step back and saying, OK, what’s really going to move the needle for my company and my business. Marketers can’t rush in to the data landscape without knowing what they want to come back with.”

Level 2: Tweenies

Gianetto agrees. “Data for data’s sake is really not valuable. It’s all just overhead.” To get called up, he says, “You have to have the ability to translate data, or analytics, or data science into something that can impact the business. Find that right moment or that right demographic or that right segment that you can really capitalize on.”

“If you’re in marketing meetings and you talk about customer journeys, and being customer focused, then focus on the customer,” Cifuentes says. “It’s critically important to have a firm grasp on the available data, channels, devices, and sources of that data for customers, especially as it pertains to segmenting your users and understanding their journeys as groups of customers.”

Especially if you want to get drafted into the major leagues.

Level 3: The Pros

The last stage of marketing analytics maturity, Cifuentes notes, has mostly been reserved for larger organizations just due to the data volume being captured.

Traditional BI has been tackling massive amounts of customer data for BI insights to improve business processes. “But because of the convergence of trends, of customer data, volume, and velocity just going up,” Cifuentes says, “those tools that are usually reserved for business-level analytics, like the data visualization stuff, the machine learning, big data — that’s bleeding over into the marketer’s side, especially around customer insights, which impacts segmentation.”

Plus, the rise of customer channels and devices means that there’s a growing need for marketers to be able to understand customers in the context where they are — that means their channel preference, their device preference, and their usage patterns in the context of all these potential digital engagements.

The real pros are companies that are customer-oriented, are channel- and data-agnostic, and have analytics down to a science. They support rapid segmentation without third-party tools and can use data science to create insights in minutes or hours, and not days or weeks.

But Cifuentes notes, “Without segments, it’s just data on a graph. Whether you’ve observed it or think it’s going to happen, it’s just data on a graph.”

Rosenblatt agrees that segments are the key. “We get so lost in the data that we forget sometimes the action– how to take action, what to do with it,” he says.

Leveling Up

Storytellers must lock arms with data scientists, and work collaboratively to tell the story around the data, figure out what’s actionable,and find insight that’s powerful. Everyone needs to start answering the question, How do we take advantage of something that we know that no one else knows?

Because that’s when you start knocking the ball right out of the park.

Speakers:

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/11/marketing-analytics-find-out-what-it-takes-to-play-with-the-big-guys-webinar-wrap-up/feed/01850887Marketing analytics: Find out what it takes to play with the big guys (webinar wrap-up)What we learned about succeeding in the on-demand economy (aka the Uber of Everything)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/10/what-we-learned-about-succeeding-in-the-on-demand-economy-aka-the-uber-of-everything/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/10/what-we-learned-about-succeeding-in-the-on-demand-economy-aka-the-uber-of-everything/#respondThu, 10 Dec 2015 12:10:34 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1850265SPONSORED: What does it take to rise above the noise? VentureBeat’s recent webinar, “The Uber of Everything,” offers essential insights into harnessing unprecedented opportunities to develop the next killer app.
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SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced in association with Trialpay.

Missed it? You can still access the star-studded webinar exploring what it takes to succeed in the on-demand economy.

There exists a latent demand for consumers getting what they want, when they want it. To stay competitive in the growing on-demand economy, companies need to deliver near-instant gratification to consumers across increasingly crowded verticals.

What does it take to rise above the noise? VentureBeat’s recent webinar, “The Uber of Everything,” offers essential insights into harnessing unprecedented opportunities to develop the next killer app.

Moderator Terry Angelos, Co-founder and CEO of TrialPay, was joined by Sean Behr, founder and CEO of Zirx, Jared Simon, COO and co-founder of Hotel Tonight, and Dave Frankel, managing partner of Founder Collective. This panel of on-demand experts shared their insights on opening up innovative new spaces, transforming customer experiences, and becoming indispensible.

Consumer-led economy

The panel kicked off by addressing the great “chicken or egg” debate: did desire for instant delivery already exist, leading to a push to develop the technology? Or was it the technology that allowed for on-demand that created the desire for more?

“Instant gratification is a fundamental human demand,” Simon says. “Consumers are increasingly aware that the technology exists to give them what they want, when they want it, and entrepreneurs are better-positioned than ever to capitalize on that desire.”

However, while the technology does address the demand, it is also driving it forward.

Behr notes, “Entrepreneurs have never had as easy a time launching an app. The platforms [that Google and Apple] have provided give access to millions of people by developing a single piece of technology. That enables you to not only deliver that technology, but tap that demand” for convenience, immediacy, and timesaving.

Uncovering opportunities for disruption

The panelists agreed that disruption is the holy grail of the on-demand economy, and it all comes down to changing consumer behavior. Once you change consumer behavior — for instance, when you start ordering an instant car service and stop taking taxis — that’s disruption.

“Regardless of what industry you’re in,” commented Simon, “to the extent that there’s a way to improve it — and the incumbents are not recognizing that, or they’re too lazy to do anything about it — then there’s room for disruption. And if you improve it, then you’ve disrupted. Especially if [consumers] start to catch on and it becomes a widespread demand.”

But a successful app needs to go far beyond dressing up an old business with on-demand functionality. Frankel warns that it’s essential to look at the economic margins of the underlying business, offering Warby Parker, an online prescription eyewear service, as an example.

While it’s an e-commerce company, Frankel noted that Warby’s approach offers essential insights for the on-demand market. It entered the prescription glasses market, which has been run by a monopoly charging a 300 percent markup, with the necessary logistics in place to slash costs for consumers and still turn a significant profit. The same principle applies to any would-be on-demand entrepreneur – you better make sure the margins are there for you to be successful.

Challenges across the board

Once you’ve identified a service ripe for disruption, you have to understand the challenges that go with it.

To date, most on-demand services tend to be geared to more affluent customers. While that has provided some success, it’s still a limited customer base. To stay ahead of the pack, Uber had to move quickly to expand their service beyond high-end luxury vehicle pickups. Zirx, which offers full-service on-demand valet parking, appeals to a higher income demographic, but Behr notes that their business model also required lower-priced convenience options, such as pick-ups and drop-offs.

Each industry and its specific dynamics present their own challenges. For Hotel Tonight, for example, their main competitors are established incumbents who have staked their claim by doing all things in hospitality pretty well. The way Hotel Tonight has pushed back is by doing one thing extremely well: the ability to snag a last-minute reservation in exactly the right hotel for their users, addressing a specific and relevant need as it arises.

Logistical complexity is another huge stumbling block. Behr cautions that there’s a real cost to innovation. When you branch out into on-demand service, the logistical complexity goes up significantly. In the world of on-demand, scaling supply and demand can crush you if you don’t have the infrastructure you need in place.

Gaining traction

Apart from logistical challenges, the biggest question for any business is how to snag the most eyeballs at the best ROI. Angelos offered up some surprising data on app ecosystem penetration — namely, that on-demand consumers tend to only interact with a single app. In other words, familiarity with one on-demand service does not equate to a deep dive into the full on-demand world.

Stickiness appears to be an issue, too.

But the panelists agreed after reviewing the data that retention rates are impressive compared to most consumer products. More importantly, the on-demand world is not dominated by monolithic companies, leaving plenty of room for energetic startups to take advantage of the growth opportunities.

Fundamentally, when company awareness is low, it means that the number of people you can attract is high. To break out, get above the noise level, and get into users’ hands, you need to be creative about finding more ways to get in front of more eyeballs profitably.

The panelists advised that one way to do this is for entrepreneurs to stay on top of the increasing number of opportunities to inject products into other services. Third-party APIs help companies tie together best-of-breed services for seamless customer experiences and expanded visibility.

Trends for 2016 and beyond

“We don’t know what the killer app of 2016 is, or the killer app of 2017,” Frankel says, “but we know one thing for sure: There will be a killer app of 2016.”

The panelists agreed that, as always, customer dropoff will continue to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it’s sustainability as a business that investors will be keeping a keen eye on.

As Simon says, “Much more rationality will prevail,” as entrepreneurs increasingly realize they need to focus on creating a business that both makes money for investors and provides the kind of excellent service for customers that disrupts an industry.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/10/what-we-learned-about-succeeding-in-the-on-demand-economy-aka-the-uber-of-everything/feed/01850265What we learned about succeeding in the on-demand economy (aka the Uber of Everything)How to drive ad revenue with precise location targeting (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/how-to-drive-ad-revenue-with-precise-location-targeting-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/how-to-drive-ad-revenue-with-precise-location-targeting-webinar/#respondMon, 07 Dec 2015 23:32:56 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1814369VB WEBINAR: This webinar is now available on demand. Listen right here for free. “The golden rule for every business man is this: ‘Put yourself in your customer’s place.'” That fantastic quote from American writer Orison Swett Marden has served as a vital tip for marketers on how to sell. With the volume of data available today, […]
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“The golden rule for every business man is this: ‘Put yourself in your customer’s place.'” That fantastic quote from American writer Orison Swett Marden has served as a vital tip for marketers on how to sell.

With the volume of data available today, it’s becoming easier to understand who buys your product and how to better serve them in the future. However, perhaps the best tool available to marketers today — that will put them in their cutomer’s place literally — is precise location targeting, which is used to specifically target consumers with the products they want at exactly the right time and right place.

Numbers don’t lie. Precise location targeting works, as demonstrated by this report from BIA/Kelsey which is projecting that location-targeted mobile advertising will reach $6.6 billion this year in the U.S. It’s not hard to understand its tremendous success, considering the endless possibilities location targeting offers — such as enticing a returning customer near your store with a coupon, or using geofencing to steal customers away from your competitors with killer deals.

The same aspects holds true for mobile app developers, such as advertising your games at locations with dreadfully long waiting periods. What better way to make time fly at the airport than playing a quick game of Candy Crush?

Or analyzing a user’s location history to reveal crucial information that will help you cater better to their needs going forward. Frequent trips to schools and parks? Sounds like a parent looking for family-oriented products and activities.

As precise location targeting becomes more widespread, the questions on how to successfully conquer this strategy increases as well. How should I use location targeting to advertise my products without it becoming invasive? Will I lose potential customers if my targeted ads are off by a mile or two? How accurate are geo-tagged WiFi networks in capturing location data in the first place?

These questions and more will be addressed in this webinar with Skyhook CEO Jim Crowley and VP of marketing Mike Schneider as well as VB Insight’s Director of Marketing Technology, Stewart Rogers. Learn about the current state of user targeting and how companies who are positioning themselves for success are killing it. And learn about how to effectively market to specific customers and calculate critical data for future strategies.

This invaluable intel will put you closer to your customer’s place than you ever realized was possible.

Missed this essential webinar on winning over customers in the on-demand economy? Get essential insights from those on the front lines.

“What do we need?”

“STUFF!”

“And when do we need it?”

“RIGHT NOW!”

You can’t swing an Ethernet cable on a city street without hitting a vehicle that’s serving up some on-demand business. Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar are all trying to supplant the traditional taxi for as-needed, app-driven transportation. Google started Google Express to battle traditional retailers and Amazon with local delivery, while Amazon has launched one-hour delivery in some markets and is testing drones to bypass even having to put tires on potentially crowded roads.

The major players are all trying to one-up each other, while numerous startups are hoping they can break in with a fresh strategy for what they believe will be the next must-have service.

David Frankel is an entrepreneur who’s one of the partners behind Founder Collective, a venture-capital firm that invests in many startups on a global basis. From his office chair, he’s seen the best and the worst, and to successfully manage the company’s investments, he needs a keen eye on what works well in the I-want-it-now Age. He spoke to VentureBeat about some key factors that companies need to think about in order to serve and survive in today’s increasingly on-demand business climate.

1. Thoroughly understand the customer

Certainly, a fundamental consideration for anyone wanting to offer goods and services on demand is to know what today’s consumer wants — then figure out how to deliver it efficiently and quickly.

“Consumer expectations for immediacy have just significantly changed, and for companies to manage those expectations has become a challenge,” Frankel said. “The upside side of that is just how many opportunities there are now for on-demand everything. You can almost look at it vertical by vertical, and it feels like we’re still at the beginning. [There are] a lot of things we never really saw as an inconvenience being inconvenient, because you could never get them on demand. There’s no question, there’s this insatiable desire for convenience.”

2. Be smart when you scale up

It’s one thing to start a business, but entirely another to grow it while still meeting the goals set down in the company’s mission statement. Frankel talked about how the most successful on-demand businesses aren’t only finding a consumer need to be addressed, but are also handling the necessary scaling that business — and the technology they’re using to handle it — well enough to keep up with customer orders.

“Fulfilling that promise — and fulfilling it at scale — has become this enormous challenge,” Frankel said. “Those that surmount it — who really surmount it because they’re able to scale their technology and have addressed markets that are less capital-intensive, in my view — those will be the winners. And I think we’ll see many, many more of them.”

3. Zoom past stagnant or clumsy competitors

How about a business idea where there are already players in the game. You’re shut out, right? Not in Frankel’s mind — he believes you can challenge the status quo (and he sees it happening all of the time), but you just need to be smart about it.

“To go up against incumbents, your product can’t be 2x better,” Frankel said. “You can’t do more or less the same thing, but just have HD photos. The product has to be 10x better — it has to do something significantly better to be disruptive.”

He also advises that, in addition to steering clear of trying a simple “me too” play, you should look for opportunities where a product may have been designed for the Web, but is missing out on the mobile market. And look for competitors who are faltering in one way or another, perhaps making a miscue that’ll “screw up their momentum” or going off on what ends up being a misadventure due to poor acquisitions.

Frankel has plenty of other helpful and cautionary advice that he gives to his investment stakeholders, and in this webinar, he and the other panelists freely share that advice with you. Register and take advantage of the free guidance to succeed in the on-demand economy.

Speakers:

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

This webinar is sponsored by TrialPay.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/what-it-takes-to-win-in-the-on-demand-economy-webinar/feed/01848307What it takes to win in the on-demand economy (webinar)I want it now: What it takes to be part of the on-demand economy (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/01/i-want-it-now-what-it-takes-to-be-part-of-the-on-demand-economy-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/01/i-want-it-now-what-it-takes-to-be-part-of-the-on-demand-economy-webinar/#respondTue, 01 Dec 2015 17:05:17 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1839056VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live on-demand webinar. Register here for free. We’re living in an on-demand world. You can watch any show online, schedule any car ride, or order any take-out with a push of an app. As the public’s demand for instant gratification grows, we’re seeing new and pre-existing companies rise up to answer the […]
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We’re living in an on-demand world. You can watch any show online, schedule any car ride, or order any take-out with a push of an app. As the public’s demand for instant gratification grows, we’re seeing new and pre-existing companies rise up to answer the call.

But despite all the technical innovations, we’re still not living a Star Trek world of instant teleportation. Not everything is suitable for on-demand services, and many eager entrepreneurs don’t understand exactly what they’re getting into — and are finding that out the hard way.

What business are you really in?

“The biggest mistake in the on-demand space is being confused about what business you’re actually in,” said Sean Behr, CEO of the on-demand valet parking business ZIRX, who spoke with VentureBeat about the challenges facing on-demand services. Behr is also one of the exciting panelists of this upcoming webinar.

“There are a bunch of people who started an on-demand valet parking service – like mine – and thought they were in a technology business and didn’t realize they were in a parking business.

ZIRX will pick up your car, park it at one of its warehouses, and bring it back to you when requested. The San Francisco-based company will even go the extra mile by providing car washes, refueling, oil changes and more for subscribed users.

But as Behr explained, often companies who believe they’re cutting-edge tech services underestimate the massive logistical challenges in the on-demand economy, and many fail to provide the actual services they’re expected to deliver, such as, in the case of on-demand parking, having enough space in their warehouses for customer vehicles.

He also warned about companies expanding too soon, without being able to quickly scale the resources needed to meet widespread demand. As Behr says, “How fast can you grow, while still keeping your quality high?”

Assessing the on-demand appetite

While Uber and AirBnB rose to unicorn status because they often offered a price point lower than their traditional competitors (taxicabs and hotels), many on-demand businesses only thrive because of a premium price paired with immediate delivery of goods or services.

Behr used an analogy of an imaginary on-demand diaper delivery service to explain how companies need to assess the potential market.

“The question is: Are they paying for the convenience or the utility,” Behr asked. “I would want to figure out if customers are willing to pay an extra $10 to have the diapers delivered. If the answer is yes, then maybe we have something. But there are a lot of customers who are like, ‘I’m a young family. I don’t have the $10 extra to have diapers delivered. For me diapers are a utility and I can buy them in bulk from Amazon and I’m a Amazon Prime member and I get them shipped to me for free and your convenience isn’t worth $10.’”

“That would give us a lot of information about whether or not to add an on-demand component. I would say the same thing for valet parking. I say the same thing for anything. If the customer is not willing to pay for the convenience, then it should not be an on-demand business.”

Transparency in payment

Still, the on-demand economy usually starts and stops with the device in people’s hands, which includes a seamless payment experience.

“Security is tablestakes now,” says Behr. As is a frictionless, easy payment platform. But what he says is till being figured out is the level of transparency on-demand businesses adopt.

“Some companies just charge you one number and all the costs are figured out behind the scenes,” Behr explains. ‘But others will break down what they’re charging for the goods, the delivery, the tax, the tip. “Do I tell you upfront exactly how much you’re going to be paying or do you I give you a round number and then make it secure and frictionless?” he says.

Questions like these are still evolving as more and more on-demand businesses emerge, and more and more dollars are being exchanged in the “I want it now” economy.

Join this timely discussion to understand the changing needs of consumers and how best to acquire and keep them.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/01/i-want-it-now-what-it-takes-to-be-part-of-the-on-demand-economy-webinar/feed/01839056I want it now: What it takes to be part of the on-demand economy (webinar)The Uber of Everything: The secret to winning on-demand mobile customers (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/11/the-uber-of-everything-the-secret-to-winning-on-demand-mobile-customers-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/11/the-uber-of-everything-the-secret-to-winning-on-demand-mobile-customers-webinar/#respondWed, 11 Nov 2015 15:35:26 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1836493VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar brought you by VentureBeat. Register here for free. As unreal as it may seem, we’re living in a generation where (almost) anything can be bought with a push of a button. Need to pre-order tickets for the new Star Wars movie? Just log on to Fandango. How about playing […]
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As unreal as it may seem, we’re living in a generation where (almost) anything can be bought with a push of a button. Need to pre-order tickets for the new Star Wars movie? Just log on to Fandango. How about playing the latest Call of Duty? It’s only a download purchase away. Best of all? We can get all this and more NOW

Our moms and dads may have advised us about always planning ahead, but they lived in the era of pay phones and beepers. We — the mobile generation — can get whatever we want at whatever time we choose —- whether it’s a meal, a dog-walker, a taxi, or help with packing up for a move.

As exciting as it is to live in an era of instant gratification, learning how to meet these demands can be scary for businesses. Consumers need their goods now and if you can’t give it to them, then they’ll get it somewhere else. For mobile companies already struggling to standout among the millions of apps online, the thought of losing potential customers over a slow user experience can be frightening.

Fulfilling the needs of the “Gotta have it now” generation may appear difficult, but it’s not impossible. Just look at Hotel Tonight, a mobile-only company that focuses on booking the best rooms at the best prices at the very last minute. One of the company’s recent initiatives — offering discounted hotel rooms to guests using location on their mobile phones — was so successful the rates are now available from 6 a.m. instead of midday.

Jared Simon, Co-Founder and COO of Hotel Tonight, spoke with VentureBeat about catering to the instant gratification needs of today’s consumers.

“As a society, we’re becoming much more used to the fact we can get what we want when we want it – and society is demanding more of that instant gratification – and businesses are responding.” Simon said. “As an entrepreneur, your best friend is technological advances that allow you to solve problems that couldn’t be solved before. But there are certain technological advances that go beyond just solving a problem better. They’re technological advancements that change the fundamental fabric of society — and that happens every 10-20 years where we see one of these advancements.”

Simon described the web as one of those advancements, as it fundamentally changed the way society interacted among themselves and with businesses. It provided us with all the information we could ever want at out fingertips and made us more self-sufficient in the process. The transition to mobile is having an even greater change on us, as we expect apps to satisfy our hunger for instant gratification and authentic human experiences — criteria we never considered for websites. It’s why Hotel Tonight focuses on building a lifelong relationship with its consumers, so they’ll continue to use their app in the future.

He also addressed the significant differences between paying on a website versus mobile and how it affects the user.

“The process you go through when you’re on a traditional website and purchasing anything is very different from the process you go through on an app like Hotel Tonight in terms of paying,” Simon says. As he explained, the typical fields required when making a desktop payment would never work on mobile.

“When we started Hotel Tonight in 2010, there were no commerce-focused apps and we had to invent a new way of taking payment on the fly in order to speed that process and make it a mobile experience. It’s the concept of storing an account so it’s one tap to check out and book your hotel, reducing the amount of information we collect form our customers, yet still maintaining the highest degree of security around credit card information.”

“There’s a whole lot of innovation we had to put into the app ensure we could do that. And then the advent of tools like Apple Pay or Google Wallet –allowing customers to store their credit card and literally pay with one tap without loading a credit card in each app — have benefited us tremendously both in terms of conversion and security.”

For more valuable information about the new on-demand economy taking over businesses and how to meet those needs, join this webinar featuring Simon, Terry Angelos of Trialpay, and Sean Behr from Zirx.

Speakers:

Terry Angelos, Co-Founder and CEO, TrialPay

Jared Simon, Co-Founder and COO, Hotel Tonight

Sean Behr, CEO, Zirx

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

This webinar is sponsored by TrialPay.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/11/the-uber-of-everything-the-secret-to-winning-on-demand-mobile-customers-webinar/feed/01836493The Uber of Everything: The secret to winning on-demand mobile customers (webinar)How real-time, real-place targeting is reaping huge rewards (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/09/how-real-time-real-place-targeting-is-reaping-huge-rewards-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/09/how-real-time-real-place-targeting-is-reaping-huge-rewards-webinar/#respondMon, 09 Nov 2015 17:15:46 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1822806VB WEBINAR: This webinar is now available on demand. Watch right here for free. Trying to stay current with marketing strategies in a mobile-first world can make you feel like you’re running a marathon with no goal in sight. No wonder marketers are fatigued, especially in trying to nail the delivery of relevant and personalized experiences to users […]
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Trying to stay current with marketing strategies in a mobile-first world can make you feel like you’re running a marathon with no goal in sight. No wonder marketers are fatigued, especially in trying to nail the delivery of relevant and personalized experiences to users who are just as valuable to your competitors as they are to you.

Enter precise location targeting: the under-utilized secret weapon that pinpoints a user’s location and provides marketers with the necessary information to tailor experiences and communications to the current situation in real-time, real-place.

Mike Schneider, VP of Marketing at Skyhook — a first-party location network company — delivered a detailed explanation of location targeting, when interviewed by VentureBeat.

“What are the components of targeting?” Schneider began. “They’re message, person, place, and time. Or put another way, right person, right place, right time. Location is the place.”

He elaborated by saying location targeting allows marketers to put context to the user’s coordinates — allowing for powerful user interceptions such as geofencing, which triggers an event when a person arrives at an exact location.

“We have a word call ‘appticipation,’” Schneider explained. “Where you use data to provide the experience the user doesn’t know that they want yet. For instance, when you’re at home using a retail app, you want the experience geared towards either building a list to take to the store or buying something on spot. But when you’re in the store, you come for a specific purpose. So with location-targeting, you want to gear the experience towards helping users find the items that they came to find or get help.”

For example, at Home Depot, when a user arrives at the retail location, the app can tell them about a workshop going on. Or at Sephora, perhaps you learn about the opportunity for a makeover or try a product.

“We enable you to be able to automate that,” says Schneider. “You can have the user skip a few steps and that’s a reduction in friction, which gives you the opportunity to do more for the user.”

One exciting example Schneider provided was the CardStar app — an app that takes loyalty tags off keychains and puts them into your phone. In its first incarnation, users would have to open the app, and scroll through all their cards to find the right one. Thanks to geofencing, a 20-second inconvenience of scrolling is turned into a five-second experience that immediately serves up the right loyalty card.

Schneider also gave advice for start-up companies struggling to implement precise location targeting into their business strategy. He asked companies to question the accuracy of their location signals first, and then emphasized the importance of using the right strategy to get users to turn on their location service.

When a prompt for location services first appears in a new app, Schneider says, “Consumers are going to ask ‘What do they need that for?’ They don’t think it’s going to add value for them. So the challenge is how do you let them know you’re going to give them better content or offers or enhance the experience when you have location data. Whatever you’re going to do, tell them you’re going to do it, then ask for location services.”

Schneider compared the situation with the current state of location services to the early days of online shopping: Online retailers would offer 30 percent off brick-and-mortar prices just to get beyond users’ early apprehensions about giving up credit card information online. Of course, paying online is now completely commonplace. But with the nascent state of location-based marketing, businesses eager for consumers to provide the gift of location-based data must ensure they communicate first what’s in it for them.

For the webinar, Schneider will elaborate on the many benefits to precise location-targeting for marketers, how it’s being used to increase engagement, as well as the pitfalls that lead to poor performances. He’ll be joined by Skyhook CEO Jim Crowley and VentureBeat’s director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers in this discussion aimed at educating marketers on the new age of advertising.

Learn how user intelligence and precision location targeting is the key to build a robust marketing strategy.

Speakers:

Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat

Mike Schneider, VP of Marketing, Skyhook

This webinar is sponsored by Skyhook.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/09/how-real-time-real-place-targeting-is-reaping-huge-rewards-webinar/feed/01822806How real-time, real-place targeting is reaping huge rewards (webinar)Three tips in on-demand payments you can’t afford to miss (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/05/three-tips-in-on-demand-payments-you-cant-afford-to-miss-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/05/three-tips-in-on-demand-payments-you-cant-afford-to-miss-webinar/#respondMon, 05 Oct 2015 18:47:00 +0000https://venturebeat.com/?p=1805501VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, December 1 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. Fast, now, instant. Consumers now expect to swipe and click their way to the products and services they want with unprecedented speed, using the devices that are most convenient wherever they happen to be. Just look […]
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Fast, now, instant. Consumers now expect to swipe and click their way to the products and services they want with unprecedented speed, using the devices that are most convenient wherever they happen to be.

Just look at the grocery vertical. Delivery is quickly disrupting the way consumers are filling their fridges and pantries. The On-Demand Economy conducted a survey of 250 Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s customers purchasing groceries online, and found that the overwhelming factor in choosing to shop online was the convenience of deliveries, followed by a dislike of carrying groceries, being away from the vicinity of the store, a dislike of waiting in line, followed by other factors.

The Uberfication of the service industry affects everything from ground transportation to household tasks, dry cleaning, dog walking, doctor’s house calls and dozens of others.

But what does this mean for businesses trying to stay current with consumers who don’t associate phones with making phone calls as much as they do with transactions. This is entirely changing the relationship between customers and entrepreneurs.

Payment strategies must ensure flawless execution. Marketing strategies must be honed to intercept shoppers at the right time, right place.

Join us as we hold a spirited discussion on the quickly-changing on-demand landscape and what it means to millions of businesses everywhere.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Change the relationship between your customer and the businessSpeakers:

Terry Angelos, Co-Founder and CEO, Trialpay

Jared Simon, COO and co-founder, Hotel Tonight

Sean Behr, CEO, Zirx

This webinar is sponsored by Trialpay.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/05/three-tips-in-on-demand-payments-you-cant-afford-to-miss-webinar/feed/01805501Three tips in on-demand payments you can’t afford to miss (webinar)4 surefire ways to improve customer retention and growthhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/09/29/4-surefire-ways-to-improve-customer-retention-and-growth/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/29/4-surefire-ways-to-improve-customer-retention-and-growth/#respondTue, 29 Sep 2015 15:10:28 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1811691SPONSORED: This sponsored post is produced in association with Citrix GoToWebinar. In today’s hyper-connected, multi-channel world, turning a lead into a loyal customer has become almost as challenging as turning lead into gold for an alchemist. Fortunately, marketers today actually have all the tools needed to guide their customers’ journey through the sales funnel and maximize […]
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SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced in association with Citrix GoToWebinar.

In today’s hyper-connected, multi-channel world, turning a lead into a loyal customer has become almost as challenging as turning lead into gold for an alchemist. Fortunately, marketers today actually have all the tools needed to guide their customers’ journey through the sales funnel and maximize their lifetime value.

Focusing on user retention is key. In e-commerce, customer acquisition costs are sky-high — so you need to ensure your customers keep coming back to break even on your investment.

In fact, an online customer loyalty study by Bain & Co revealed that even a five percent increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits of between 25 and 95 percent. Additionally, the report also highlighted that most businesses need to retain customers for at least 12 to 18 months to break even on their investment.

The path to customer contentment is easier to walk when it’s guided by the two beacons of user loyalty — brand authenticity and sincerity to service.

Actions speak louder than words. If you’re ready to lead a mature customer loyalty initiative, then here are a few service catastrophes you want to avoid — the things that will undermine any retention efforts:

Inconsistent resolution of customer issues

Over-promising/under-delivering service

Treating customers crudely or showing mistrust

Repetitive transfers of customer support calls and poor delegation for handling the complaint ticket

Leaving the customers in “support limbo” without following up on queries and issues

Incessantly advertising another product to the customers without fully resolving their support issues

Before setting off on your journey to become a master of user retention, it’s essential to first become a keen student of personalized marketing strategy. According to a study by Experian Marketing Services, personalized marketing emails receive 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click-through rates than non-personalized mailings.

Emphasizing the essence of personalized marketing, Qubit CEO Graham Cooke said, “By understanding your customers’ previous browsing and shopping behavior, you can improve retention by showing products they might have run out of or through a better understanding of their preferences.”

All of this adds up to pro-active engagement with your customers, the kind seen in the four approaches below.

1. Offer a loyalty program

All loyalty programs beget user retention, but not all loyalty programs are created equal. Arbitrary titles like “VIP” or “Gold Member” are frivolous if you simply fail to communicate the short-term and long-term benefits of your loyalty scheme to your consumers,

A strong multichannel loyalty scheme strives for constant relevance in the eyes of your customer by giving you a transparent account of the points rewarded for each purchase. By tracking their score, you can send special promotional offers that highlight how they can redeem those points for maximum savings.

No matter what kind of loyalty program you implement, it’s always best to allow customers use the devices that are part of their lives 24/7. Do away with inconvenient punch cards and let your customers use their mobile device to receive updates and track offers through push notifications or app engagements.

Incentivizing social media actions as part of your loyalty program is a simple and powerful way to mobilize your loyalty program without draining your resources. For instance, Zyrtec’s highly successful rewards program engaged customers through a monthly Facebook secret word loyalty incentive. They posted a picture on their Facebook brand timeline, which included the secret word and a link to the rewards website. Once logged in, members could enter the secret word and gain 10 points in their rewards account.

This tactic not only improved engagement on Zyrtec’s Facebook page, but also helped build awareness among its Facebook fans who had not signed up for their loyalty program.

2. Go above and beyond with your customer service

According to a Zendesk report on customer loyalty, 88 percent of consumers rank quality and 72 percent rank customer service as the two principal drivers of loyalty.

While many companies try to cut down on handling calls in a bid to lower costs, it is vital to sustain a dependable multichannel customer support system that effectively leverages e-mail, social, and call center channels based on the complexity of queries.

For instance, many brands now do the majority of their customer resolution work through their Twitter feed. Highly technical issues are forwarded to the call centre team to hasten the resolution process.

According to the 2014 UBM Customer Connects survey, webinars proved to be a valuable content asset for delivering a more hands-on customer service experience. It showed that webinars are primarily used for technology demos (67 percent), technical info (66 percent), technology news and analysis (57 percent), how-to info (52 percent), and training purposes (48 percent).

The report highlighted the immense retention potential webinars can offer to marketers. According to the survey, the top three customer actions taken after viewing a webinar were:

61 percent of users went to the vendor website

58 percent shared the webinar with a colleague

34 percent based a product purchase decision on info learned through the webinar

Eliminating the element of uncertainty from your customer’s lifecycle can earn you a lot of brownie points too. By taking proactive approaches to anticipate problems that could snowball into negative experiences, you can do a better job at guaranteeing customer satisfaction. For example, corporate billing agencies can alert customers when their invoice is nearly due to avoid bombarding them with unpleasant late payment charges later.

3. Cultivate your own community culture

An engaged community of customers is truly the pinnacle of brand loyalty all marketers strive for because it can have a huge impact on driving repeat sales. Additionally, it helps you gain key insights into the evolving demands of customers to help tweak your campaign to fit their needs.

For instance, Naked Wines offers its members, known as Angels, special discounts on all goods and also offers them exclusive use of their mobile app to order wine on-the-go and interact with independent winemakers from around the world.

A proactive community can be one of the most successful automated marketing tools for your brand as users congregate to contribute experiences and ideas that motivate the community to keep investing in your brand. You can hire communitymanagersto supplement the work of product managers.

Inbound.org and Growthhackers are two dazzling examples of community culture done right. Both of them are high-traffic communities built from the ground up by product companies Moz, Hubspot, and Qualaroo. In this way, customers will naturally have their products in the back of their minds when they participate in community discussions.

The key is to cultivate a sentiment of ownership in your company in the minds of your customers. Tying in your loyalty program with your community engagements is another great way to keep your customers coming back for more compelling offers.

As far as your social media community engagements are concerned, a platform like Buffer should be at the top of your priority list for maintaining an automated cadence for your tweets and posts across all channels. It can be a huge advantage when it comes to maximizing brand visibility on social platforms.

If you’re looking for a simple and priceless way of creating temporary discussion threads to engage your followers, hosting #TwitterChats is a great way to do so.

4. Follow up with personalized post-purchase e-mail

Apart from sending the standard product purchase confirmation message, businesses can use strategic post-purchase e-mails as a bridge to connect further with customers and work towards extracting more value out of these interactions.

Here are six popular types of post-purchase e-mail messages that can help you derive more insights and conversions:

Service satisfaction survey — for an honest analysis of the state of your customer service

Product review request — for valuable feedback on your core product

Cross-sell/recommendation — for taking advantage of your customer’s social network and attracting new leads

Short-supply reminder — for products and services with expiry dates or periodic maintenance requirements; it helps anchor your customers to your brand and creates a regular flow of revenue

Bounceback — for upselling or downselling customers by sending special incentives to customers who have recently purchased something from your company

With each of these post-purchase messages, the key is to generate extra touch points to keep customer engagement alive and kicking by encouraging feedback and incentivizing future purchases.

However, the success of multichannel customer engagement relies on better integration between diverse marketing processes and the implementation of new technologies. Developing a pervasive customer engagement hub with the right technical infrastructure is what brands must strive for to make it big.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/29/4-surefire-ways-to-improve-customer-retention-and-growth/feed/018116914 surefire ways to improve customer retention and growthHow to turn data overload into real and meaningful action (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/21/how-to-turn-data-overload-into-real-and-meaningful-action-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/21/how-to-turn-data-overload-into-real-and-meaningful-action-webinar/#respondMon, 21 Sep 2015 19:54:51 +0000https://venturebeat.com/?p=1806870VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, September 22 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. As most marketers know, today’s challenge isn’t pulling enough data — there’s more available than most can use. The challenge is making sense of it all. For Scott Beck, coordinator of Xavier University’s new Master of Science in […]
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As most marketers know, today’s challenge isn’t pulling enough data — there’s more available than most can use. The challenge is making sense of it all. For Scott Beck, coordinator of Xavier University’s new Master of Science in Customer Analytics program starting this fall, it comes down to storytelling.

“What we’re seeing is that we have plenty of data; it’s a matter of figuring out how to bring the data together to tell the right story,” says Beck. “It’s really hard to let go of those things that have gotten you to where you are today, and instead embrace the technology to help you get that crisper view of what the customer is really trying to tell you just by their behaviour.”

Xavier’s new program will be starting with a group of 25 students who will be working with real-world data provided by a partnership of eight companies located in the Cinncinati area — including Macy’s, Procter and Gamble, Kroger, and 84.51°. With access to this kind of data from Fortune500 companies, Beck’s goal is to produce thought-leaders rather than data-pullers, those that can interpret data to convey actionable insights to business leaders.

“When we think about people and data, there tend to be groups that are really good at mining the data and generating a lot of charts, tables, and graphs,” Beck explains. “And then there are people that are more client-leadership or client-service people who can go through some general highlights of it. But to be able to bring the two together, is really tough.”

Certainly, that’s a frustration shared by many organizations as demonstrated in VB Insight’s recent report, The State of Marketing Analytics. In this essential webinar for marketers, VB Insight analyst Jon Cifuentes will be taking attendees through the most important take-aways of the report, and will be joined by Beck and others to share their experiences and advice on leveraging data in the real world.

Certainly, determining the best tech platforms is important – and Cifuentes will be sharing VB’s findings on the most successful ones. However, for Beck, the specific technology isn’t as important as the talent using it.

“Technology is changing at such a rapid pace that in a lot of respects the technology is moot,” he says. “It’s more a question of, do you really want us to train and deliver people that are adept at levering FAS? Or do you want us to deliver thought leaders and people who can actually tell you what all the data means?”

Join Beck and the rest for an hour that will speed by as fast as tech changes — and boost your understanding of how data can tell you what you really need to know, and how to action it.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/21/how-to-turn-data-overload-into-real-and-meaningful-action-webinar/feed/01806870How to turn data overload into real and meaningful action (webinar)Tweet chat today: Marketing analytics with Jon Cifuenteshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/09/17/tweet-chat-today-marketing-analytics-with-jon-cifuentes/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/17/tweet-chat-today-marketing-analytics-with-jon-cifuentes/#respondThu, 17 Sep 2015 15:18:09 +0000https://venturebeat.com/?p=1805180The problem with being a marketer today is that it’s tough to find — and network with — the best minds in marketing. GrowthBeats only happen so often, right? We’re bringing that GrowthBeat experience to your laptop through VB Insight Twitter Chats. VentureBeat’s Twitter Chats are your opportunity to join in that conversation without hauling yourself […]
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The problem with being a marketer today is that it’s tough to find — and network with — the best minds in marketing. GrowthBeats only happen so often, right? We’re bringing that GrowthBeat experience to your laptop through VB Insight Twitter Chats. VentureBeat’s Twitter Chats are your opportunity to join in that conversation without hauling yourself halfway across the country. These conversations are value-loaded and time-critical — in just a half hour you can get valuable insight, share knowledge and thought leadership, and make connections with top marketing minds — all without leaving your desk chair.

Join VentureBeat on Thursday, September 17 at 12 p.m. PT/ 3 p.m. ET/ 19:00 GMT for a special Twitter Chat with VentureBeat Insight analyst Jon Cifuentes, author of VB Insight’s most recent report on marketing analytics. We’ll be chatting about marketing analytics — specifically how customer analytics is driving today’s marketing decisions and where to get the best value in your analytics strategy. In addition to Cifuentes, we’ve also invited industry insiders and marketing experts to share their wisdom and insight — and we want to hear your voice as well. You can follow the #vbwebinars hashtag to stay up to the minute in the chat.

Introduce yourself with your first #vbwebinars tweet, including your name, title, and the organization you are with.

The questions will flow from the @VentureBeat Twitter handle with the hashtag #vbwebinars tagged to each tweet.

The Tweet Chat Questions

@VentureBeat will issue questions out to our audience with a hashtag #vbwebinars to trend the discussion (this is the same hashtag that we’ll be using for our webinar as well). It will ask the first question at 12:01 p.m., and the final question will be asked at 12:25 p.m.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/17/tweet-chat-today-marketing-analytics-with-jon-cifuentes/feed/01805180Tweet chat today: Marketing analytics with Jon CifuentesHow savvy B2B marketers are killing it at lead gen (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/09/how-savvy-b2b-marketers-are-killing-it-at-lead-gen-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/09/how-savvy-b2b-marketers-are-killing-it-at-lead-gen-webinar/#respondWed, 09 Sep 2015 12:45:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1793985VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, September 10 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. The face-to-face B2B sales process of the past — the many phone calls, the gratuitous lunches, the exhausting trade shows, followed by more phone calls — has been transformed by the digital landscape. The number […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, September 10 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.

The face-to-face B2B sales process of the past — the many phone calls, the gratuitous lunches, the exhausting trade shows, followed by more phone calls — has been transformed by the digital landscape. The number of touchpoints and opportunities that now exist to intercept prospects and turn them into viable leads is unprecedented.

That doesn’t mean lead generation has become easy. It takes a healthy mix of art and science to succeed in a hyper-competitive, crowded space. And it takes a well-honed knowledge of all the available channels and how they can compliment one another.

That’s because there’s no one silver bullet for lead generation. If you think email alone is going to give you the results you’re looking for, or an aggressive adword campaign, you’ll be overlooking many of the tactics that successful B2B marketers bring together to turn the top of the funnel into leads that convert.

Email, search marketing, display ads, webinars, social campaigns, content marketing and syndication, on-demand events, blogs — not to mention strategic use of your own website — are all elements that need to be considered.

Of course, that list, which is not exhaustive, can be exhausting. In this webinar, we’ll look at the kinds of tools marketers need to ease the process, and ways to test and scale that make it all manageable — and ultimately get you the ideal mix of lead gen tactics for your business.

Join our panel of expert B2B marketers who will share insights and best practices that can heat up your lead gen game.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/09/how-savvy-b2b-marketers-are-killing-it-at-lead-gen-webinar/feed/01793985How savvy B2B marketers are killing it at lead gen (webinar)Tracking, seeing, understanding: How top marketers make data-driven decisions (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/08/tracking-seeing-understanding-how-top-marketers-make-data-driven-decisions-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/08/tracking-seeing-understanding-how-top-marketers-make-data-driven-decisions-webinar/#respondTue, 08 Sep 2015 19:13:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1798449VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, September 22 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. The recent avalanche of customer data has created a bounty for marketers. The ability to track every customer interaction across their lifetime has created a way to engage and convert like never before. But it’s also […]
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VB WEBINAR:

Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, September 22 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.

The recent avalanche of customer data has created a bounty for marketers. The ability to track every customer interaction across their lifetime has created a way to engage and convert like never before. But it’s also made marketers’ jobs a whole lot harder.

According to VB Insight’s recent report, The State of Marketing Analytics, there’s quite a bit of dissatisfaction when it comes to gathering and analyzing data, and turning it into action. While 67 percent of marketers say that big data is “very or critically important to the financial success of their firm“, almost half (46 percent) think their business partners (i.e. cloud-based data platforms) were not at all effective or not very effective at translating their team’s insights into actions or results. And this is based on data across every category of marketers, industry, company size, and budget.

Despite this negative view, 73 percent of brands plan to increase their investment in analytics over the next three years — and that number gets closer to 100 percent for market cap B2C companies.

So what’s a marketer to do? The current state of confusion and frustration is exactly why VB dove into marketing analytics in such detail — and developed a roadmap for change.

In this upcoming webinar, you’ll find there’s actually a lot to be optimistic about. VB Insight analyst Jon Cifuentes will be taking attendees through the most important take-aways of the report, including VB’s best bets from the hundreds of vendors and platforms available.

He’ll be joined by top data experts who will share their inside-track perspective on the best way to leverage analytics to actionable insights. If more data has just created more heartache, grief, or confusion for you, this is one webinar you do not want to miss.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/08/tracking-seeing-understanding-how-top-marketers-make-data-driven-decisions-webinar/feed/01798449Tracking, seeing, understanding: How top marketers make data-driven decisions (webinar)The single source of truth: Unifying customer identity data (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/the-single-source-of-truth-unifying-customer-identity-data-webinar-tomorrow/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/the-single-source-of-truth-unifying-customer-identity-data-webinar-tomorrow/#respondWed, 26 Aug 2015 20:07:57 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1791989VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, August 27 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. Like a lot of traditional business sectors, the energy management industry is notorious for relying on face-to-face sales. But as a lot of B2B marketers have realized, that’s not a strategy for growth in a digitally-led world. […]
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Like a lot of traditional business sectors, the energy management industry is notorious for relying on face-to-face sales. But as a lot of B2B marketers have realized, that’s not a strategy for growth in a digitally-led world.

According to Shawn Burns, “Once you’re able to digitize the customer relationship — and know who you’re talking to, and personalize who you’re talking to — you can massively accelerate the way they buy products from you as you’re chasing growth.”

Burns is SVP of digital marketing for Schneider Electric, a multinational energy management and automation company with 170,000 employees in over 100 countries. For Burns, growth has a lot to do with identity management and building one-to-one customer reationships at scale.

Central to this is building what Burns calls a single source of truth. And it’s what a whole lot of marketers are racing to figure out these days. How to bring together customer data files into one single, holistic source with accessibility to an entire organization — including marketing teams, sales teams, and inbound call centers.

It’s a strong focus for this webinar tomorrow in which a panel of experts, including Burns and VB Insight Analyst Andrew Jones will be joined by others and digging in deep to share what works and what doesn’t works in terms of customer identity management. While Jones will be sharing the findings of VB’s recent report on Identity and Marketing, including VB’s best bets for data collection and aggregation tools, Burns and colleagues will be sharing their best practice tips from the trenches.

“We know there’s an ongoing challenge of too many customer data files, and that only works against you,” says Burns, “So you really have to embrace a single source of truth. And it sounds simple but it’s one of the most complicated things for an organization to do because it requires governance, it requires an immense amount of change manageement, and it requires communication.”

The technology piece is paramount, but Burns also cannot overstate governance.

“If marketing wants to get credit for doing all this amazing effort to create leads and pipelines, then they have to be living and dying off of that technology solution, which in most cases, is the internal CRM,” he adds. And compensation needs to be tied to that adherance. That means compensating marketing teams not on what they do, but on the outcomes they achieve. “Anything short of that begins to look like ‘Hey, I’m running in the yard, look at me — I’m running in the yard.'” And that is how you get people to begin to build a single source of truth.

Yet, as paramount as that digital holistic view of the customer is, Burns has a cautionary note. To say today’s business world moves swiftly is an understatement — people move from job to job more than at any other time in history. Companies are constantly being merged, migrated, acquired, or even going out of business.

“Data has a very short life span. You can spend many, many years building a rich customer database, and you believe that you have this amazing data warehouse to conduct business with and you realize very quickly that the world has changed.” Which is why it’s imperative for him to use just-in-time data — something too many businesses overlook when relying on customer identity.

Join us for this webinar as our panel explores essential challenges around customer data — and will answer the questions that are burning in your mind.

Speakers:

This webinar is sponsored by Janrain. All research presented was done in advance and entirely independent of any sponsor.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/the-single-source-of-truth-unifying-customer-identity-data-webinar-tomorrow/feed/01791989The single source of truth: Unifying customer identity data (webinar)Marketing meet agile: Reaping huge benefits from integrating agile processes into marketing and creative (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/marketing-meet-agile-reaping-huge-benefits-from-integrating-agile-processes-into-marketing-and-creative-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/marketing-meet-agile-reaping-huge-benefits-from-integrating-agile-processes-into-marketing-and-creative-webinar/#respondWed, 26 Aug 2015 11:10:56 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1782298VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, September 1 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. The notion of big, hulking marketing campaigns that get released once a quarter, or even once a year, has morphed substantially. The digital world is responsible. It’s accelerated the pace for companies to stay competitive […]
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The notion of big, hulking marketing campaigns that get released once a quarter, or even once a year, has morphed substantially. The digital world is responsible. It’s accelerated the pace for companies to stay competitive in a hyper-fast-firing world, using the digital toolbox to respond to increased consumer demand and rapidly shifting priorities.

Marketing: meet agile

Increasingly, companies are realizing that by integrating agile methodologies, they enable a speed to market — and ability to respond — that previously was unachievable.

“In terms of business goals, the most valuable aspect of agile is this idea of accelerating the cadence at which marketing operates,” said Scott Brinker, CTO of Ion Interactive and Chiefmartec.com — and one of our featured panelists in this upcoming webinar.

“Instead of these long quarter-long, half-year-long, or even year-long planning cycles being our primary cadence, we can get down to something that’s operating more in a matter of weeks.”

Agile provides a management mechanism that breaks things down into smaller chunks and enables marketers to try versions of things that are a little more lightweight — a way to test the waters, learn, and then refine and build on that in the next cycle. It’s what the agile community calls incremental and iterative deliverables, or continuous deployment.

“There ends up being a great benefit,” said Brinker. “It’s all too common to see, once we agree on a plan, everybody kind of goes head down into that plan — or worst case, they end up trying to deal with fire drills that disrupt the plan but nobody talks about giving up the plan and it gets ridiculously hard.”

He contrasted this with iteration cycles that are two, three, or four weeks in length that offer a built-in mechanism to react and pivot as things change. Perhaps the competitive threat has changed, or the audience response to a particular campaign wasn’t what was expected. Without being locked into a campaign that is months in the making, critical adjustments can be made.

“From a business perspective, it becomes by far the greatest material advantage that an organization gets [from agile],” said Brinker.

Transparency leads to recognition

Fundamental to agile is the notion of transparency. Borrowing from Kanban methodology, the idea is to map all the stories that marketing is engaged in, all the things that business wants the marketing team to deliver, and all the tasks required for those. From that master list, priorities are agreed upon and sprints are established.

“The beautiful thing is you have transparency about what those tasks are and what their status is,” explained Brinker. “Are they waiting to be tackled, are they in progress, who’s the person who has the ownership for that, is it now done and being queued up, is it ready for deployment, is it out in the field?”

And if that physical or digital board is shared among all stakeholders in the company, there’s a huge side benefit.

“Most people don’t realize all of the things that marketers are doing from 5 in the morning till midnight,” said Brinker. “And when you actually see all this activity captured and you see how it progresses, usually it’s a big boost of recognition for all the work that marketing is doing.”

High-level strategic goals meets iterative

However, as Brinker explained, not all marketing responsibilities are going to fit tightly into iterative tasks. One extreme example he gives is high-level strategic positioning for a company. Said company may determine that there are three strategic messages that are key to its positioning in the coming year.

“These become a higher level set of goalposts that you use to evaluate the iterations you’re doing,” said Brinker, “to evaluate against those strategic lenses.”

If you consider those Kanban-style visual boards that map the entire process, much of the time, people are moving along a horizontal flow, progressing from column one to column two and so on.

“But what I’ve seen a number of companies do is create a vertical categorization — I call them swim lanes,” said Brinker. “So I can say these are the three strategic priorities we we have with the marketing effort overall for the next year, so let’s put those swim lanes onto our Kanban board — and as we’re classifying the tasks we’re going to be working on, we put them in those relative swim lanes. We make sure things get attached to a strategic goal.”

Join Brinker, along with Stewart Rogers, VB Insight’s Director of Marketing; Philip Sheldrake of Euler Partners; and Dave Lesué, Creative Director at Workfront for an inside look at how to implement agile into marketing and creative teams — and reap the benefits.

In this webinar, you’ll:

* Learn how top-performing marketing teams win by planning work in sprints
* Understand how to organize priorities strategically
* Discover how to prove your value as a creative team with continuous improvement
* Find out why agile methodologies are the key to driving results

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/26/marketing-meet-agile-reaping-huge-benefits-from-integrating-agile-processes-into-marketing-and-creative-webinar/feed/01782298Marketing meet agile: Reaping huge benefits from integrating agile processes into marketing and creative (webinar)Unifying identity data for a holistic view: what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to watch out for (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/24/unifying-identity-data-for-a-holistic-view-what-works-what-doesnt-and-what-you-need-to-watch-out-for-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/24/unifying-identity-data-for-a-holistic-view-what-works-what-doesnt-and-what-you-need-to-watch-out-for-webinar/#respondMon, 24 Aug 2015 16:01:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1789512VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, August 27 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. Big data has sent marketers scurrying for quick answers to map the customer journey and serve up hyper-personalized experiences to prove their relevance to consumers. No question, data is arguably this decade’s most important gift to marketers. […]
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Big data has sent marketers scurrying for quick answers to map the customer journey and serve up hyper-personalized experiences to prove their relevance to consumers. No question, data is arguably this decade’s most important gift to marketers.

In this webinar, VB analyst Andrew Jones will be revealing important findings from our latest report on Identity and Marketing including the many types of ID markers that can be collected, VB’s best bets for data collection and aggregation tools, and the best way to bring it all together.

However, not so fast on the identity charge, say some, including Zouhair Belkoura, who will be contributing a valuable perspective to our panel discussion. As CEO of KeepSafe, a service that lets you store all your important digital files securely (think of it as a fortress-like digital locker), Belkoura is very attuned to privacy and empowering individuals to be in control of what they share with whom.

“If you think of the industry as a whole, you’ll see that the requirements for anonymity and privacy are somewhat relaxed,” said Belkoura. “But at which point to you cross the line from trying to gather information that is useful to becoming creepy?”

For Belkoura, the creep-line is crossed when you decouple anonymity from a rich profile — and, in fact, he believes it’s outright dangerous. “I think the dilemma in creating these profiles is on two levels. First, when you don’t secure your data enough so that you may have breaches on your back end, that’s one of the biggest risks. The second is when you use the information in a way that exposes to the customer in a very apparent way that you’re violating a social norm — aka you become creepy.”

KeepSafe is very intent on personalizing their experience for users, but collects the absolute minimum about who the customer is, and instead focuses on what the customer does.

“We don’t actually know anything about you, so we’ve designed the product in such a way that if you haven’t discovered some of the very rich features in KeepSafe, you’ll learn about them,” said Belkoura. “If we realize after three months of using KeepSafe, that there are certain things that you’ve never actually touched, we may notify you in the user interface: ‘Hey, did you know there’s this, that, and the other thing that can enhance your experience?'”

On the other hand, Belkoura sees tremendous power in profiles and identity — when the consumer chooses to share that information. He distinguishes this from what he calls ‘behind-the-scenes profile generation,” when companies intent on hyper-targeting collect data and aggregate that information into an identity profile to tailor ads.

“The dangerous part is when you have this data craze and you collect all this information about the customer who never wanted to explicitly give it up,” asserted Belkoura. But he is quick to compare this to an instance like Instagram or Snapchat, where users will choose to follow certain accounts, including certain brands, and then the platform can show the user content that is more tailored to their interests, including ads that they’ll be more interested in.

“Personalization is fantastic if you get this information from the consumer voluntarily — but that’s very, very different from this behind-the-scenes profile generation.”

In fact, he sees the success of his company as a cautionary note to others. “From our perspective, it’s important for fellow startups and companies to know that consumers do really care about their privacy, so the most important thing is to respect that — and take the popularity of services like ours as a signal not to mess with it too much.”

Join us for what will undoubtedly be an illuminating discussion on what successful companies are doing around identity unification, the best tech platforms to do it, and consumers’ need for their privacy that can’t be ignored.

Speakers:

This webinar is sponsored by Janrain. All research presented was done in advance and entirely independent of any sponsor.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/24/unifying-identity-data-for-a-holistic-view-what-works-what-doesnt-and-what-you-need-to-watch-out-for-webinar/feed/01789512Unifying identity data for a holistic view: what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to watch out for (webinar)The future of personalization: Putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes (webinar)http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/11/the-future-of-personalization-putting-yourself-in-the-consumers-shoes-webinar/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/11/the-future-of-personalization-putting-yourself-in-the-consumers-shoes-webinar/#respondTue, 11 Aug 2015 17:20:18 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1783383VB WEBINAR: Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, August 13 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. For those in the know, the future of personalization can look pretty scary. There’s certainly just as much evil as good that can be done with our information, and the tools at a marketer’s fingertips to […]
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For those in the know, the future of personalization can look pretty scary. There’s certainly just as much evil as good that can be done with our information, and the tools at a marketer’s fingertips to use personal data — email, IP address, device info, geolocation, psychographics, buying habits, etc. — keep getting more and more powerful.

So, perhaps the question marketers need to ask is: How would I feel about having my personal info used against me? Context, it seems, has something do with finding the right answer.

“On one hand, as a marketer, you want to think outside of the box. Of course with that, you open up Pandora’s box and the scary possibilities of personalization,” said Preeti Kelapure, senior product marketing manager at Glassdoor. “I think it’s a fine balance with always thinking about what’s possible and balancing that against you as a user, and what you’d be comfortable with as a consumer.”

Glassdoor combines anonymous reviews, ratings, and salary content with job listings to help job seekers find the best jobs and address critical questions that come up during the job search, application, interview, and negotiation phases of employment. To Kelapure, the type of personal data that Glassdoor collects is potentially much more sensitive than the kind of personal data someone like eBay or Etsy might have on you, and it needs to be treated as such.

“In some instances, like ecommerce, more personalization is very beneficial — if a user buys a dress and you want to upsell, or cross-sell, them an accessory, there’s a clear use there,” she offered. “But something as sensitive as somebody’s job search, or sharing resume information, you don’t want to be revealing personal information like that you’ve collected on the user.”

The challenge, then, for Glassdoor and other companies struggling with their right approach to personalization is to find the sweet spot where the user feels assisted by the introduction of personalized content, messages, and alerts, but not offended or creeped out by them.

“We’re trying to get a place where we know who our users are and where they are in their job cycle or job search, with a goal of understanding them and then being able to tailor their experience in a way that’s useful,” said Kelapure. “So, knowing who they are and what they’re doing on our site and being able to take action in a multi-channel approach, whether it’s on our site, or via email, or a notification or in our app. It’s really just being able to message in a way that’s consistent across those different platforms and across the user’s lifecycle experience with our brand.”

Being consistent across the different channels — web, mobile web, apps, email, etc. — may be the most difficult part of the personalization challenge.

“It’s pretty complicated,” she said. “Trying to get the unified experience is the ultimate goal. Right now, our native app experience is slightly different than our desktop and mobile web experience. The challenge is to show users that we are trustworthy and we’re not going to use the power of what they share with us to do anything but help them.”

VB’s team of experts and some special guests will be diving deep into personalization in our upcoming webinar — to find out where it’s going and how to make it more useful, and to safeguard against creating a creepy experience for your consumers.

In this not-to-be-missed webinar, VB Insight director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers will take you through the essential findings of his latest “State of Marketing Technology — Personalization” report, which surveyed over 1,700 consumers, as well as experts, vendors, and commentators. And for some real-world insights into how personalization can be applied with outstanding results, Rogers will be joined by Preeti Kelapure of the career community Glassdoor and Brijen Rajput, SVP of online marketing at FarePortal, a travel portal that includes CheapOAir.com.

What you’ll learn:

What types of personalization are acceptable, and which to avoid

The correct process for on-boarding personalization, and how to manage when consumers opt out

What the future of personalization looks like, for both B2C and B2B organizations

The rules and regulations at play

The marketing technologies that will save all marketers from crossing the “uncanny valley” into “Creepyville”

Speakers:

Stewart Rogers, Director, Marketing Technology, VB Insight

Brijen Rajput, SVP of Online Marketing, FarePortal/CheapOAir

Preeti Kelapure, Marketing Manager, Glassdoor

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/11/the-future-of-personalization-putting-yourself-in-the-consumers-shoes-webinar/feed/01783383The future of personalization: Putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes (webinar)Minding the marketing gap: ON24 and Act-On partner to bridge top of funnel and sales gaphttp://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/minding-the-marketing-gap-on24-and-act-on-partner-to-bridge-top-of-funnel-and-sales-gap/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/minding-the-marketing-gap-on24-and-act-on-partner-to-bridge-top-of-funnel-and-sales-gap/#respondTue, 07 Apr 2015 07:01:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1691939ON24 and Act-On are partnering to deliver webinar engagement data to the marketing automation platform. The goal? Helping marketers more effectively nurture qualified leads. Marketers use webinars at the top and in the middle of the sales funnel. As one of those platforms, ON24 provides metrics about engagement, like whether registrants actually show up, whether they […]
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Marketers use webinars at the top and in the middle of the sales funnel. As one of those platforms, ON24 provides metrics about engagement, like whether registrants actually show up, whether they participate in polls, or ask questions. Yet that rich interest data doesn’t always go to good use.

In fact, it often skips marketing altogether and goes straight to sales via CRM or, heaven-forbid, a spreadsheet. Leads can go stale this way. Sales normally can’t act on all the attendance and participation data anyway, so most of it is wasted.

Until now.

ON24 will pass 25 types of metrics that it collects on to Act-On. Among those metrics, this includes an engagement score — a single numeric score between on and ten — that is designed to work with a lead score.

What this means is that organizations can pass those scores into their marketing automation systems, and then nurture leads automatically and appropriately … only passing along the best leads to sales. Other audience segments may not be far enough along in the buying cycle.

For instance, an attendee who stayed for only two minutes should be treated differently than one who stayed throughout and asked questions. Both actions might trigger followups in marketing automation, but the former might be to re-register for another webinar. The latter might be to download a related whitepaper.

The key here is that marketing automation helps bridge the gap between lead generation and sales.

Marketing automation is rules-based, so the more data it can use to take actions on, the more effective it can be. For this reason, marketing automation platforms are becoming the hub for driving marketing technology and engagement overall, and we can expect the number of data partnerships to grow.

ON24 was founded in 1998 and launched its Webcast Center platform in 2002. The company raised $8 Million in 2008 in its only round of funding.

Act-On was founded in 2008 and has received $72.5 Million in five rounds of funding.

The majority of people don’t really care that much about which collaboration tools they use while at work, including those in charge of picking out a particular service. So how do enterprise software companies like On24 drum up attention to their webinar platforms?

By rapping, of course.

On24 hired well-known YouTube creator DJ Dave (of getting real in Whole Foods parking lot fame) to create a music video in which he weaves all of the most cringeworthy marketing buzzwords into a semi-coherent rap song called “This is How you Webinar.” And as a bonus, it even features a cameo appearance by Waymond Lee, who is a regular on Comedy Central’s Workaholics. (It’s a bit weird because Lee is talking in the music video, which is something you rarely if ever hear him doing on Workaholics.)

The company doesn’t just plug the music video, though, as On24 actually integrates the entire “webinar rap” theme into a product pitch splash page. It’s nice to see that a few enterprise-level companies aren’t afraid to fully commit to a ridiculous marketing campaign like this.

Anyway, the rap is amusing, especially for anyone that has to use words like “lead generation,” “guru,” and “core competencies” in conversations during the work day. (Plus, it’s Friday, y’all.) Check out the video embedded below.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/15/this-rap-video-about-webinars-is-brilliant-viral-marketing-video/feed/01528905This rap video about webinars is brilliant viral marketing (video)Hublished’s webinar discovery platform could actually make you care about webinarshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/hublisheds-webinar-discovery-platform-could-actually-make-you-care-about-webinars/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/hublisheds-webinar-discovery-platform-could-actually-make-you-care-about-webinars/#respondTue, 30 Jul 2013 18:10:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=786633I've never said the word webinar as many times in a single day as I did when I talked with the folks from Hublished.
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I’ve never said the word webinar as many times in a single day as I did when I talked with the folks from Hublished. And I’ve never imagined anybody, let alone a team of college students, could be so obsessed with them.

New York City-based Hublished sees a big business in webinars — live web conference-based seminars typically used for professional development. Even though webinars are immensely useful for learning about new topics and proving your company’s expertise in a field, they’re usually difficult to access (often buried deep within a company’s website) and aren’t very useful to companies once they’re over.

Hublished believes it has a solution for the fragmented content marketing world, which also includes whitepapers and research reports. Today Hublished is launching a content discovery platform that lets companies organize their webinars in a single place, integrate social features to spur on conversation with attendees, and offers companies analytics to see just how well their content performed.

Think of it like a Netflix for webinars and whitepapers — instead of visiting company sites one-by-one, you’ll have a smorgasbord of content to consume. That means there’s a higher chance your content will get discovered, and there’s less headache for someone looking for relevant training material.

“Are we sexy? No. But I think it’s a lot sexier than having webinars and ebooks in your inbox ,” said Nis Frome, Hublished’s co-founder and chief operating officer, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Hublished works with all existing webinar platforms, so companies don’t have to change their existing process. The company has already partnered with Fish & Richardson, Rutgers, Rally Point Webinars, Pam Ann Marketing, Speek, and other content publishers. It currently has around 700 people on a wait list to try the platform.

The company sees its platform as a better method for spreading the word about webinars than advertising, which often feels weirdly repetitive (i.e., using a marketing technique to advertise another marketing technique).

Frome and the other members of the Hublished team, Ben Borodach, Ryan Kuhel, and Yair Aviner, grew up together in New Jersey and first got their taste of entrepreneurialism when they started a web design firm in high school. Now every member of the team is managing a full college course load as they try to get Hublished off the ground.

Hublished ended up winning NYU professor Lawrence Lenihan’s salary ($12.500) as part of his “Ready, FIRE! Aim” entrepreneurship course last month, and the team also managed to raise $75,000 from family and friends within 12 hours. Overall, Hublished has raised around $160,000. The company has also been accepted into NYC SeedStart accelerator’s current class.

As we ended our interview, it felt clear to me that Hublished wasn’t just trying to make a buck from content marketing (the company doesn’t yet have a business plan in place) — it’s more focused on solving the fragmentation problem for social good.

“If webinars are the new advertising I think the world will be a much better place,” Frome said.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/hublisheds-webinar-discovery-platform-could-actually-make-you-care-about-webinars/feed/0786633Hublished’s webinar discovery platform could actually make you care about webinars